My Nepal Trip 2016

This past summer, I went to Nepal for the first time in 11 years. I had moved to the US when I was 5, so I only had the faintest memories of family and friends. With not knowing what to expect, it was an unimaginable experience. My younger brother, Shikhar, and I had gone planning to perform our “Bratabandha” (a religious ceremony). To us, this was the only thing really in it for us. We were angry at our parents for forcing us to “throw away” most of our summer to visit family & the sake of tradition. Looking back at it now, it was all perspective and I had definitely learned things about myself and the world all from looking at things differently.

Once we arrived, the first place we went was my uncle's house. There I saw cousins, after 11 long years, and younger cousins who I had never met; there were faces I could hardly recognize but the presences I could never forget. Regardless of all that, from the first step in, I had felt at home. This was family - the blood, sweat, and tears all of our ancestors shared so we could be together and have moments like these. While there was an obvious cultural barrier, I spoke proficient Nepali and it was never strange for we would always have things in common. Late nights complaining about life, wanting to be better than our parents, the goals we had in life; we were all just kids in this world trying to make a life for ourselves. Even when we couldn’t find the right world in each others languages, we understood.

Traffic jam near Mugling

Our trip in Nepal took a crazy turn when we took our trip to Tulsipur, Dang, a small city where my dad’s sister lived, and an hour away from the very village where my dad and my grandparents the parents of their parents had farmed and built their lives. It was a 400km trip, and with a personal car out of the story, we did what every other person did. We packed up our stuff and got on a bus. Without traffic, the route would have took us a mere 12 hours. But we got caught in a 5-km long traffic jam due to a landslide, and we ended up on the bus for about 25 hours. At first, we were nervous as to when it would end, when we could go home; everyone was tired and we had little water or food. Not to mention it was 90 degrees and humid in a bus without air conditioning. Just sitting in the bus, we naturally got bored and decided to go out and talk to the hundreds of other people coming from all over Nepal to go somewhere. We met an American family traveling to see the views of Pokhara, Nepal. We also met another family from the states going to their mother's birthplace and see the country. There were street vendors, people coming nearby towns and villages to sell fruit and drinks to those waiting in the traffic jam. It was an amazing thing to see people coming together in a time where most would have freaked out and keeping calm and making the most of a bad situation.


On our trip to Tulsipur, we took a visit  20 km west to the small village of Simthani. This was the village my dad had grown up in, one of the first places I had been when I was just a newborn. Sadly the house we had there had been taken down, but the farmlands never stopped growing. The people of the village were very kind, and I was even surprised to see that they had inconsistent, but nevertheless, working electricity.  We arrived in Simthani at the time of the Kul Puja. The traditional Kul Puja is the ceremony of paying respect to a family deity, our family paying respect to Shiva ji, the god of creation. It was a lucky coincidence being able to be part of a family tradition, and especially in a village where the people were the same ones who had helped raised my dad.

Mark Twain had once said “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” Studying American literature, I had seen this quote numerous times, but had never really given it any thought. This trip to Nepal has taught me a lot, but more than anything it has taught me who I am; a grateful, lucky person, but only a small part of the world. That’s why I choose to make a difference. While to most of the world, I am a statistic, a number, a miniscule part of the world, to the lives I touch and the people I inspire, I am something more.


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